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“While children are less likely to become severely ill from the virus that causes COVID-19, kids can get and spread the virus, they can get sick, and some have been hospitalized. Some children have even died, though fortunately deaths have been very rare,” says Children’s Hospital Colorado pediatric infectious disease expert Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH. “We don’t want to add to families’ stress, but we do want parents and children to continue to take COVID-19 seriously enough to maintain precautions — including and especially getting all family members vaccinated as soon as possible.”

But the numbers appear to show that severe illness, hospitalization and death are rare in children infected with the coronavirus.

In states where data was available, less than 2% of all child COVID-19 cases required hospitalization and 0.00% to 0.03% were fatal.

"I'm not seeing any patterns that suggest the virus is more virulent or more serious or more severe in children than it was before this variant appeared," Maldonado added.

Although there’s no evidence the delta variant causes more severe disease, the virus is so infectious that children are being hospitalized in large numbers – mostly in states with low vaccination rates. Nearly 30% of COVID-19 infections reported for the week that ended Sept. 9 were in children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But the latest surge gives new urgency to a question that has mystified scientists throughout the pandemic: What protects most children from becoming seriously ill? And why does that protection sometimes fail?

For much of the pandemic, doctors could only guess why children’s immune systems were so much more successful at rebuffing the coronavirus.

Despite the alarming number of hospitalized children in the recent surge, young people are much less likely to become critically ill. Fewer than 1% of children diagnosed with COVID-19 are hospitalized and about 0.01% die – rates that haven’t changed in recent months, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Most children shrug off the virus with little more than a sniffle.

Hospitalization and death from Covid-19 remains “uncommon” among children, the pediatrics group highlighted, with between 0.00% and 0.03% of all infections ending in death in the states that reported virus-related deaths by age.